Stinkin' Thinkin' is the seductive voice of the wounded self that keeps us doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

I have always been struck by Stinkin' Thinkin,' a concept
from AA. Stinkin' Thinkin' is the
seductive voice of the wounded self when it gives an alcholic a reason to take
another drink. I am now recognizing that
I too have a Stinkin' Thinkin' voice and that it has fueled a very different
addiction for me.

When we
were married, my husband and I went thru endless cycles of the same thing. I would try to get him to see that we had a
problem that included him, trying to get him to see what he was doing,
believing I was making it possible for us to have a better relationship. Inevitably,
he would get totally triggered and withdraw for days of agony and blame. I was totally addicted to doing this even
though it got us nowhere. Margaret
valiantly tried to get me to completely take my eyes off him, to stop trying
him to get to see anything, but I was so convinced that he also had to change
for our lives to work, that I was never completely successful at stopping. I think I was actually right about the need
for change, in the sense that if I could have faced what was really going on
between us and that I really had no control over it, I would have had to face
the fact that it could never work. But using
my addiction to try to get him to change kept me in it. Finally, as many of you know, he did me the
favor of leaving and in the pain of all that, I experienced a rocket ship
period of growth in Inner Bonding.

Fast
forward almost 5 years. Even though each
of us now has our own lives, we have become close and emotionally intimate
friends, committed to supporting each other in our growth. Not being married or even being partners
anymore did not turn out to mean that we had to lose our soul mate connection
and now there is a deep sweetness between us.
However, it also did not mean that we had to lose our ability to trigger
the same issues and that I was not going to continue to learn from them!

So, my
addiction to giving him unsolicited advice to try to make our relationship or his
life better continued, just in a more subtle way. Even though I had come light years in terms
of accepting him just as he is, the addiction was still there. I was still giving to the temptation of trying
to feel okay by giving him information about things I saw in him instead of
tuning into my little girl's anxiety and focusing on her. And when I did this, he would again get
totally triggered and again shut down for days.
Recently, we went thru another round of this. I once again gave him unsolicited advice that
came from my anxiety, and we were off to the races for 10 days. The good news is that I got the lesson at
last.

I finally
clearly saw my Stinkin' Thinkin' self in action. It is not as if I did not know, had not
connected multiple times with how this addiction was a way of abandoning myself,
and it is not as if I had not realized that this was not a loving way to be
(always too late). But it did not keep it from ever happening again because
each time, I now know, my Stinkin' Thinkin' voice would seduce me into doing it
again. I had to see exactly how it
happened, how it operated, to actually change my behavior. What the Stinkin' Thinkin' voice said to me each
time, without fail, was: "This time it is important. It will help him if you tell him this. It is a good thing to say this." And if was if I went into a trance and that voice
overrode anything else. This tune I saw
that it was a trick and a lie and that I was falling for it over and over again.

The truth is that whenever I say
something from my wounded self that could remotely be construed as critical when
he is not in a place of wanting to know, there is chance he will be triggered, fall
into his personal Hell and stay there for days. It is a gift to me that he is so sensitive to
it. Whether he should take better care
of his little boy, whether he should want to know, is absolutely
irrelevant. Whether I can hear this kind
of stuff, whether I want to know (which I do) is irrelevant. What is relevant is that when I listen to my
Stinkin' Thinkin' voice, I take the chance of sending him to his inner Hell and
that I have done this over and over again for years.
What is relevant is that my wounded thought that saying something will
be a good thing is completely off and that he is showing me that in an
unmistakable way. This is not good. This is not loving. This is not who I want to be.

I saw too how this same voice had
operated in many other situations where I thought I was sharing, thought I was
doing something positive because I believed what it said (which is that it was)
and it proved not to be true. Somehow,
until now, I just did not see exactly how this happened. I always felt the
shock of tripping up, but not the whole process. No wonder I have always been so struck by the
Peanuts cartoons where Lucy holds the football and convinces Linus that this
time she will not pull it away, but she always does. I have been Linus, endlessly tricked and
endlessly falling on my butt.

It has not been that long, but so
far so good. The voice has shown up but
it is no longer convincing. It feels
like the trick has been revealed and I don't need to fall for this version of Stinkin'
Thinkin' anymore. I am in profound
gratitude and awe and eagerly await the next lesson.